“Nazi Fantasy”: Vilém Flusser and History as Site of Experiment (Routledge Studies in Modern European History)

This book brings together Vilém Flusser and intellectual Jewish history of the second half of the twentieth century.Flusser is viewed today by many scholars as the most original theoretician of media and photography in the second half of the twentieth century, and yet this is the first monograph about him in English. Combining elements of Flusser’s biography with a rigorous study of his writing, this book shows that concepts of ‘virtuality’, ‘medium’, and ‘embodiment’ underpin not only Flusser’s understanding of technological media, such as photography, but also his understanding of evolution and of real or imaginary biological organisms.This book argues that Flusser contended with Nazism in his writings on these biological and ecological themes.Two threads - and their relationship - are explored: the first bears on Nazism as undergirded by a biological perspective - an attempt to eradicate a population taken to be parasitic; in the second, Nazism is simply viewed as ‘stupid’.Such a li